The Forever Soldier
by Mr. 125
Summary: A hitwoman; frigid dark hair and gnawed lips, she's thinking of a dozen gratuitous ways to murder the man opposite her. She'll need to decide on one once the phone rings, and she's expecting it to. A pistol, a knife, and a cell phone all within her reach, she's ready to be used like a restless pen scribbling words to the pace of domineering, more self-assured dictation. (Lit. fic)
1. Chapter 1

Atop the sterile surface of a folding table, a cell phone rests innocently between the mark—a man, black-bagged and ziptied to a rustic looking kitchen stool—and the operative. A hitwoman; frigid dark hair and gnawed lips, she's thinking of a dozen gratuitous ways to murder the man opposite her. She'll need to decide on one once the phone rings, and she's expecting it to. She doesn't know when, just that it will. But she needs to be patient.

She sits unnaturally still as if tied herself, limbs restrained from any unpermitted tics or twitches. She's so quiet, she suspects the man doesn't even know she's in the same room as him—that she's been here for the past twenty-seven minutes, sharing with him this space of malicious intent that is so immaculately arranged, stapled and draped ceiling to floor with slaughterhouse plastic.

A loaded 9mm pistol has been placed closest to the edge of the table and a suppressor lies nearby, positioned like an enticing suggestion. Not imperative, but there if she needs it, maybe, perhaps. Its ugly wasp nest tip just barely touches the matte barrel at an angle, compliant to the subtle power held over it by the tiny tilt of an uneven table leg underneath. A defect imperceptible by a casual glance except when the thought suddenly occurs to you that something isn't quite right. A crystalline glass with a crooked waterline—an aggravating error that needs to be corrected and can be.

In a precise movement, her fingertips make contact with rubber and her wrist pivots to straighten out the wayward accessory. The noise is like a polite throat-clear. A warning growl in the silence. It gets the man's attention, and his head perks up. His nervous inhale sucks in the thin material, gluing the bag to the front of his face until she can make out the contours of his concave eye sockets, pointed nose, and open mouth. He's a tortured face in the throes of a scream under the scratches of Munch's sadistic pastels, eyes gouged and tongue carved out.

But she knows what he really looks like because she's stared at him every day for a week. In return, she doesn't believe he's seen her, or that he'll recognize her if he has. She'd been a tight shadow, non-existent to the oblivious; or a hazy face in a crowd, nose buried in teacups always, inconspicuous at worst. However, that dance is all over with. Secrecy and subtlety are no longer required, now that she has him all to herself. He is the problem that needs solving, and soon, maybe. She doesn't like uncertainty.

There's a camera leering over her shoulder, propped up by a tripod. It's not recording, though. At least, not yet. It hasn't been positioned to make her uncomfortable. She isn't the unwilling, unaware subject being fed to hungry eyes. She's more like the director and has the camera where she wants it, perfectly centred and white-balanced and everything. All so they'll see everything and make no mistake about it. The humane way to go about would be to pick up the 9mm and shoot him in the forehead—him unsuspecting—but this method is problematic to whatever she is supposed to accomplish. There'll be no way to identify who she's just killed, and she wants them to know and understand—whoever will be watching. And although she's been told the room is soundproofed, she's still skeptical. Her neighbours are in close proximity and she's certain the walls are as thin as they look.

So her hand naturally gravitates to the hilt of a knife calmly set beside the pistol when she walks through all the steps of the procedure in her head. The serrated tool is louder and angrier than any firearm you can give her and she suspects this is the sole reason why it's been laid out for her in the first place—the bound man is soft skin and a lot of blood. A bullet is underwhelming and never looks like it does in cinema, lacking the red, punchy melodrama of postproduction. In reality, it's over too fast and only momentarily shocking, ending in ambiguity rather than graphic finality. The pistol sends a message; the knife delivers the detached pinkie in a foreboding envelope. Yet she still hasn't decided, and she hates this uncertainty.

The cell phone remains in its place, untouched and rarely glanced at. An archaic contraption that'll never leave the inside of this safe house. Despite her being in a town that still hasn't caught up to modern times completely—more dirt roads than paved ones, rusty automobiles parked forever in ditches, ramshackle farmhouses disappearing into rebellious olive groves—the phone definitely can't be reintroduced. It's a dead technology, long replaced by weightless cloud computing. Nobody here has one. Nobody except for the operative and whoever she is expecting a call from.

It's extremely outdated even by her time—her own time. It's important to make this distinction because the operative fell asleep Yesterday and woke up Tomorrow, the Tomorrow she and everyone fantasized about when their Today was on the verge of collapse and nothing indicated a hopeful deviation in their fiery, downwards course. She'd gone to sleep uncertain, reassured that everything will be all right by a woman who's looked after her ever since she can remember, and who she thinks she loves but can't be sure (if she does, and if she might love her back) and has never asked.

She hopes, though, because for this woman, the operative is sitting in this plastic room, a pistol, a knife, and a cell phone all within her reach, herself ready to be used like a restless pen scribbling words to the pace of domineering, more self-assured dictation. She both dreads and craves to hear those gentle, encouraging whispers on the other end of the phone—when it'll ring. Soon, she both dreads and craves. She continues to gaze at the mark opposite her, a man she's been thinking about murdering for the last week, and both hostages wait for the call.

#

The concierge is helpful enough. He asks no questions when he slides a greasy key-card across the ink-scored front desk. Rachel tweezes at it almost surgically between black finger forceps, her leather gloves lustrous in the mouldy light that settles over the tiny room masquerading as a hotel lobby. She holds it away from herself, tempering whatever contagion that could possibly be spread from the crusty thing, when she adjusts her handbag and crosses the floor to the stairwell. She knows that the sweaty concierge will stare at her ass when she climbs it and takes the bend out of view, her pointed boots thumping on thinning carpet and hollow wood all the way to the fourth floor.

Old, narrow hallway; wilting wall sconces and cobwebs. Rachel traverses its length and receives a passing glance from a scrawny couple headed in the opposite direction. They are kitschy scarves, knit caps, and for him, a ratty mechanic's jacket with a name that's not his own stitched on the breast pocket. Rachel doesn't belong here among the low rent, no-wave set dressing; the cigarette tarred ceiling and wallpaper—and the crocheted patches where the gunk was scraped off, thrust over some flame, and sucked in again. Her pallid blonde hair is too bright for this place.

Rachel finally reaches her door and walks in. She doesn't blink when she sees a younger man sitting on the bed, back to her and hunched over. She recognizes Julian from behind: his dark hair, and the fact that she knows this is his room—the concierge was helpful enough. There's another woman by the bathroom, leaned up against the doorframe there, lanky arms folded over her bare breasts. Behind dollar store lashes and Cleopatra eyeliner, her gaze flits from Rachel to the back of Julian's head, then Rachel again. "Who the fuck are you?" she demands. "His mom?"

Julian turns a bit. Rachel can see he's been crying. She says to the woman, "Did he already pay you?"

"Yeah."

"Then get the fuck out."

The woman is indifferent. She pulls on a tube top and swipes her purse from off the nightstand while Rachel watches and waits. She's completely still as the woman moves past her to leave in her wobbly, cantankerous way. Then, standing in the trickled light of the hallway, the woman pauses to say: "Limp-dick cocksucker's all yours." The door slams. There's just the quiet murmur of a dusty television in the corner of the room.

Rachel circles the bed lazily. Julian keeps his eyes on her boots, even as she comes to a stop in front of him. His trousers lie on the hotel floor. She says to him, "Marie called me. Dinner was ready an hour ago." Finally a reaction—Julian winces when he hears the name. Rachel watches him carefully. "Why aren't you picking up?"

She follows the involuntary flicker in his eyes. There is a craggy paper bag on the desk. Rachel opens it and looks inside it for a long time. She crumples it back up and turns back to Julian. She says, "Does my daughter know she married such a useless, little cunt?"

Julian swallows. He says, "You saw the press release."

Rachel did.

"You know what it means."

Rachel does.

"I'm out once the deal is finalized. Investors are calling for me to hang myself with my belt. How did you even find me?"

"My contact book isn't filled with friends," Rachel says. "It's with people who owe me one."

Julian says, "Are you going to tell Marie?"

"No." Rachel's response is instant and straight. She didn't take a second to even consider it—she, especially, understands the value of a secret. She used to be Section III special projects division. Retired now. She asks, "Have you spoken to your dad yet?"

Julian doesn't reply. He isn't even taking calls from his wife, Marie, who Rachel imagines is obediently waiting at home over a bubbling pot of spaghetti. Of course Julian hasn't reached out to his father. Rachel knows that the man, Terry Stanton, has probably heard the news for himself and—knowing Terry Stanton—has probably left voice messages for his son to the effect of telling him to hang himself with his belt. Because greatest-generation, rock-steady Terry personally coined the advertising catchphrase "Stanton strong" a decade ago when he was in charge and trucking the rubble away from Old Mombasa, and right now Julian is anything but; he is a withered mess of a person hiding in a dingy hotel room, and Rachel can see his shriveled penis tucked between his legs, partially obscured by the dirty sheets. Stanton Industries is a massive corporate entity that thrived following the reconstruction of the devastated East African city; it is an empire Terry built from the ground up, and one that he had bequeathed to his heir upon his retirement a year ago, fourteen profitable years after the end of the big war.

He has, however, a right to be furious now as Julian is almost certainly days (if not hours) away from being shamefully ousted as CEO of Stanton Industries.

Rachel says, "So what happened, and who the hell is Annex Global?"

Julian clears his throat. "They came out of nowhere. There are half a dozen corporations a hundred times bigger than Annex that are competing for the contract. Somehow Annex is at the head of the running."

Like she's conducting an interrogation, Rachel is curt, her questions driven and relentless. "What does the contract net?"

"250 billion over seven years," Julian tells her. "I... thought we had it in the bag. For all the work we did in Mombasa—"

"How did you lose it?"

"Do you read The Sun?"

"I don't make it a point."

"They ran a story yesterday about Stanton rebuilding Mombasa with the ground-up bones of UNSC Marines."

"It was libellous?"

"It was true," Julian says, "but who isn't digging up the outer colonies for materials? Winger's a goddamn Torrie. He's had it out for us since we backed Gaulin's campaign last year—publicly."

Rachel nods. The conservative columnist is a dying breed, especially in this post-war slump. She knows that Jerry Winger and the rest of them are bitter that they can't peddle their war bond-fear mongering bullshit like they did at the height of the war. But obviously someone at Space Command is an admirer of Winger's rambling.

"Winger made a lot of friends back then," Julian says.

"It was a good time to be a defense contractor."

"It's _always_ a good time to be a defense contractor."

This makes Rachel think. She's somewhere inside her head when she suddenly asks him, "How much is Annex Global worth?"

Julian looks up at her. "I can make a call and get a figure for you."

"Don't. From this point on, you're not to go anywhere near this thing. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he says, meekly.

"Good boy." Rachel comes closer to him, her knees nearly touching his. She strokes the underside of his jaw with a gloved finger, then her hand closes around his throat for a moment, and Julian shivers appreciatively. He reaches for the folds of her skirt. Rachel thinks of spaghetti spattered on a stovetop somewhere. When she feels his fingernails on the inside of her thigh, she cruelly slaps his wrist away—she looks almost repulsed by him. But she says, "Not tonight."

Rachel moves away and reapplies her lipstick, peering into the vanity. Despite the grunginess of the room, she decides she likes the dim lighting. Here she's a soft-featured, three-point lit beauty but with the eyes of an old woman. There's no cosmetic lift to disguise those tired, jagged things. She is well aware of the trouble she wants to go looking for. She picks up the paper bag from the desk and conceals it in her handbag before leaving. She tells Julian, "Just go home."

Julian, standing up from the bed, begins, "My dad..."

"Let me talk to Terry," Rachel says. Pinched between her fingers, she has already retrieved her palm-sized, leather bound contact book. "I'll take care of everything."

#

Twenty six hours later, Brooklyn Fields wakes up in her titanium casket. She has no control over her soaked, jellyfish limbs that quiver with renewed life. She expels the breath of air that she's held in her lungs for fifteen years. While consciously trying to even out her frantic gasps, she peers through the frosty pane. Eager eyes stare back. Hands are leisurely clasped. She's a spectacle, an unearthed museum piece for a predatory audience. She has a feeling she's only breathing again because she has a function to fulfil. But whether she likes it or not, she is ready to be used.

THE FOREVER SOLDIER


	2. Chapter 2

Brooke's cranial nerves are just fine. The woman who performed the examination—simple commands to determine the necessary: can you see? Can you hear? Can you follow? (Can you kill?)—repeats this valuable assessment to Rachel, who stands a solitary two metres away, watching wordlessly. Throughout the exam, Rachel remained in place neither smiling or frowning—a wintry expression of critical neutrality—while the woman proved that Brooke was normal. Undamaged, a term Brooke overhears. Functioning satisfactorily.

Just fine.

She can't tell whether or not this is good news or bad to Rachel—her expression didn't change hearing this. Brooke is suddenly afraid that Rachel—who she has always reverently known as Doctor Wells—isn't looking for "satisfactorily." That damning pronouncement of mediocrity. It makes Brooke want to beg for a retest because she knows she can do better and doesn't ever want to disappoint the doctor, Rachel, who watched wordlessly while her hired stooge demonstrated Brooke's apparently middling abilities (could she see? Could she hear? Could she follow?) like a trainer showing off to a stern judge her tidily shorn and coiffed Poodle, its naked body never not long-limbed and awkward. But see how intelligent she is. How obedient. She can do tricks, too—just watch.

Rachel approaches and musters a smile, feigning contentment that feels to Brooke more like passable satisfaction over the results. But when she places her shiny, black hand just behind Brooke's left ear and rubs her cheek with her thumb, Brooke almost brings herself to believe it was just an innocent check-up, and that the doctor could be happy with her thawed body that is functioning just fine. Rachel's hair is paler than before, more unnaturally coloured and simply less. They are signs of aging and decay that Brooke missed out on while she herself was preserved and living forever in her icy slumber. Brooke used to think they looked alike, although she's never shared this observation with the doctor or anyone.

Then, unexpectedly, Rachel pulls Brooke into a taut hug. Brooke wraps her arms around the small of Rachel's back, unfamiliar with the motion. Her breath caresses Brooke's own blonde hair as she whispers, "I'm so glad you're not broken."

They are surrounded by stacks of rusty shipping containers in a cathedral-peaked warehouse. Brooke was an expedited delivery; Rachel paid for the best in shipping and handling. Brooke suspects the crate she arrived in has painted on its side which end should face up, and a snotty, high-cut wineglass there to emphasize its importance. But if the cryotube was damaged in some way and Brooke came out of her sleep with a starved brain, she wonders what Rachel might have done if that were the case. Would she get a refund on damaged goods? A replacement?

Would she hold her in the same, pampering way she does now?

#

Later, Rachel and Brooke sit in the back seat of an oily black car speeding down Number 1. Marble chin fused to her shoulder like she's a brooding Rodin, Brooke's eyes dart and recover as the world rushes by her rain flecked pane. It's moving too fast, too far out of her control, and all she can do is grit her teeth—bore a hole through the unconvincing seatbelt she grips between petulant, wormy fingers. Feet wrapped in woolly socks forced in suffocating leather boots, Brooke is a corseted Russian doll held captive by Rachel's hyena-gleaming buckles and straps. The cramped backseat already feels more confining than her previous shoebox purgatory, stacked somewhere in Rachel's tidy closet that isn't supposed to exist. The window doesn't frame the world that has already forgotten Brooke, it captures her in her natural habitat—or as close an imitation as they can get—and presents her this way. She's an offering tethered to a choke-chain seatbelt, surrounded on all sides by safety glass she might claw at but can never seem to break, while everyone passes by her tiny life.

"Who are you thinking about?"

Etching a floral design on the milky pane with a fingernail, Brooke says, "No one."

"Is that right?"

Brooke lugs her heavy head to face Rachel and tucks the cold digit underneath the bend of her knee. "Who would I be thinking about?"

"I wouldn't know." Rachel has her eyes on the road ahead where the lane reflectors urgently wave the car onward. "You're just quiet tonight."

Brooke says nothing.

Rachel says to the driver up front, "Let's get some music back here," and neon-puddle, pornographic jazz wipes away all existence of Brooke in the backseat. Front-facing Rachel is always headed in one direction—the world that rips by her periphery goes unnoticed or unacknowledged and she never looks back.

But her effortless inquiry that's already evaporated is more noxious than she intended because now Brooke does begin to think of someone—she sinks into her seat and wonders where he might be. She misses his smile that she remembers, an upwards tug that was both a welcoming smirk and a smug hello the first time she met him. She didn't catch his name as he walked away, so that's all he was for a while: a smirk-smile over the shoulder of a sleek two-piece suit. Right now he's the tick-tap of stuttering, machine gun keys; velvety cigarette smoke reaching up from a too-full ashtray; the whispered whir of a dozen yellowing clocks on the wall as she stares after him. He is garage-sale filing cabinets, the smell of new whiteboard markers, sealed manila envelopes and fat ringed binders. He's another world Brooke wants to return to, not this surreal, midnight state she woke up in. She hopes he's waiting for her, somewhere. Then Rachel is two fingers through a part in the blinds and a rap on the glass; she tears Brooke's attention away from the man and drags her into her office.

The car stops outside a high-rise on a clean residential street and Rachel undoes her seatbelt. Brooke reaches to do the same, but Rachel's hand descends on hers.

"Oh, no, Brooke. I don't think that's a good idea, honey."

Her gentle touch is loaded with the Roman cruelty of a railroad spike being driven through the soft skin of her palm; Brooke is a betrayed martyr. It's the sensation of the crushing point of all of Rachel's weight thrown on a single stiletto heel. She is pinned and bitten, and can't help the fluttery feeling of unexpected disappointment.

"I've got a place all ready for you. You'll stay there tonight." Rachel unzips her handbag and hands her a lumpy paper bag. Brooke doesn't need to open it to place its distinguished curves and familiar weight. A .38 snub, probably. Where is she going that Rachel thinks she might need it?

The doctor opens the door and slinks a leg over the side. The thought of her disappearing into the long night touches Brooke and she becomes worried she may not have another chance, so she hastily asks: "Benson."

Rachel stops.

"I need to know."

Rachel weighs her answer carefully before replying. "I've looked, but all reports are unanimous. Nothing's surfaced since then to suggest otherwise"—a deep breath that Brooke feels in her gut—"that Spartan 000 was killed in action in 2552. He never made it off Reach. I'm sorry."

Brooke is surprised that the news hurts her this much. She doesn't show it, though, and she never will. Not to anyone. Voice like broken teeth and a bleeding tongue, she says, "I see. Thank you, Doctor."

"I'll see you in the morning, Brooklyn."

With the slam of the car door, Rachel returns to the world outside, leaving Brooke alone once more. She's one of the few who can just pass through. She never stays long, just long enough to play for a bit until she is satisfied. Then she'll put Brooke back in her glass cage where she found her.

The car whisks Brooke across the city where boutiques and charming cafes fall away to East Hastings grocers with doomsday barred windows and doors; lonely stoplights and saxophone street corners; the shopping cart rattles and crazy murmurs of all of the city's homeless. Brooke is dropped off on the sidewalk here with a set of keys and the revolver-shaped paper bag stuffed into her pocket. With its strangled puttering, the car is an evil U-boat slipping into the foggy sea beyond the familiar cove. Then it is out of sight and earshot. Brooke finds the address nearby and takes the stairs up to what she discovers is a utility-grade one bedroom apartment.

Tonight, she dreams of Benson who passed through her life, too. He's a face from another life that's really the same one she's living because the apartment Rachel has her shacked up in suggests nothing has really changed. She went to sleep Yesterday, woke up Tomorrow, and will soon just resume a life stuck on pause. It's a suggested return to normalcy that is both comforting and deadening. Always on the job, ready to kill.

Anyway, in her dream they stand in front of a bathroom mirror, their hair equally damp, bare skin equally scrubbed. Benson is bent over the sink, a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. He makes funny faces at himself; smiles his smile. Brooke is wrapped around him, arms around his waist, red lips to his ear. She can't let him go and feels herself pulling him in as tight as she can, soaking up his presence as if it is precious. She rubs at his hair and is all over him, soundlessly begging him to turn and take notice of her, but Benson just stares into the mirror. He lifts a hand and brings it over the glass where Brooke's face is, his fingers gently tracing her jaw line. Her hand snakes down the length of his arm. She wants to feel his touch—the woman in the mirror is undeserving of it, but she has his complete attention. Benson doesn't budge, no matter how hard Brooke tries to tug at him.

Eventually the woman Brooke barely recognizes becomes bored and struts away, leaving Benson by himself. On this side of the glass, he and Brooke stare longingly after her for a moment. Then he easily shrugs Brooke off as if he is disinterested and follows her more alluring reflection out of the room. Brooke searches for herself, but the bathroom insists on being empty and sullen. She presses both palms against the glass—

Finally Brooke awakes and rises from the couch, taking a moment to reorient herself. It's still dark outside and she guesses she couldn't have slept for more than an hour or two. She's fine with this—she's slept enough for a lifetime. She shuffles to the window that provides a view of the skyline, curls up in the corner of the room, knees to her chest, and watches the twinkling city.

#

With a plastic shopping bag in her hand, Rachel comes back in the morning where Brooke is squished in her corner, having watched the entirety of the sunrise through scanty shreds of curtains, and the stuck window—the twisted-off handle lies meekly on the radiator.

When Brooke gets to her feet, Rachel asks, "Are we okay?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Good. This is everything." Rachel gives her an envelope and Brooke dumps it out on the counter. Rachel pads into the centre of the apartment and drops her handbag on the couch. "I'll give you a minute."

Brooke studies a stack of photos, all with the same subject. The first is an official-looking headshot and Brooke makes out an ONI watermark in the corner—he's an employee, or he was, sixteen years ago. The other photos are fuzzier, taken with the indecent closeness of telephoto lenses. In the rest of these it's the same man, just aged. Brooke runs through the dossier, memorizing as much as she can. "What's the accuracy on this intel?" she asks Rachel. "He'll be where you say he'll be?"

"We put him there." Brooke's eyes shoot upward at this, but Rachel looks immaculate. Like she's rehearsed this for fifteen years, she tells Brooke: "Let me make something clear. Your actions won't reflect on ONI or myself. You're not Section III anymore. They released you to my care during demobilization. A lot of assets were deactivated, and most went private sector. UNSC-funded research patents were declassified and auctioned off."

"So what does that make me? The asset? Or the science project?"

"You're a free woman. You're not my soldier anymore, if you don't want to be."

Brooke hasn't had this conversation with Rachel before. She wouldn't dare.

Rachel continues, "If this is too much... if you're done, I understand. There's nobody who'll come looking for you." There's a sadistic soothing to Rachel's words, and Brooke knows it's deliberate. She's always been manipulative, and Brooke never wants to say no. That always fell to Benson, second-guessing Rachel's every move. Even if offered, shown the way out, Brooke will not say no to Rachel, especially now because she's thinking of a gloomy bathroom with nobody in it. Brooke realizes she has one person left in her shrinking life, and she's standing between her and the window that showcases unflinchingly an inhospitable city life she'll never be a part of.

Rachel strokes Brooke's arm with an exploratory fingernail. She says, "You know I need your help. Won't you do it for me?"

Then slowly Brooke nods. Rachel leans in and embraces her again, and gives her a clean kiss on the cheek. Brooke shuts her eyes and learns to savour the warmth that pools around her skin, learns to accept the feeling because it's all she has left. She clings to it; the promise of more will keep her going for the time being.

"You'll find instructions in the envelope. There's a carry-on in the bedroom closet that's good to go—passport and flight pass inside." Rachel holds up a clump of Brooke's hair and says, "And you'll have to do something about this." She reaches into the shopping bag she's brought and pulls out clippers and a hair-dye kit. Brooke takes the box into the bathroom, balances it on the sink, and looks resolutely at her bright hair that spills over her shoulders.

She hears the apartment door click shut, and knows Rachel's gone again. She's just passing through.


	3. Chapter 3

It takes Brooke a few hours to reach her destination, the Greek island Lemnos, quick as if she ducked into a cab outside her borrowed apartment and suddenly got out in the chestnut warmth of the Mediterranean coast, her inky, bitter coffee hair—still damp—a hasty crosshatch. She cut it herself so she knows about the mistakes, probably around the back where it's hard to be everywhere at once and there's no one else to kindly tug the clippers from her battered fingers that are already sore; they scythed through the prairie-blonde abundance flung this way and that so she could scrutinize the awkward harvest through the mirror. Then, in shirtless prayer by the tub, she rubbed the murky solution into her scalp and breathed through her mouth. After she rinsed and toweled off, Brooke dutifully weeded the yellow hairs from off the bathroom floor and out of the sink and held them in her stained hand for a minute before dropping them in the trash bag that hung on the doorknob. She still feels the gritty dye residue underneath her fingernails all these hours later.

She convinces a taxi driver outside the airport to take her to the town of Kyklos, a fifty-minute drive along the coast. When she asked if he spoke English, he adamantly shook his head no until she fumbled through an obese wad of American dollars and pretended she was generous. For that money, he strung together in broken English, you buy my car and you drive all over _Limnos_, no? Brooke smiled a smile. He loaded her carry-on into the trunk of his hatchback and they took off.

Brooke watches the waves slather upon the shore white as they trundle past, the asphalt road sometimes ending in abrupt dirt and rocky jitters before returning to civil smoothness a while later. The A/C is busted; she has her window down and her fingertips rake invisible lines through the coarse breeze travelling past. She catches the driver's eyes in the rear view mirror studying her in the backseat.

She thinks it's the hair—with his mystified-then-polite glance away, she feels like she's a sneaky girl who fished through her mother's drawer and found a pair of sewing shears she wasn't supposed to play with but did anyway because she thought it was time she became independent and learned to cut her own hair. She's satisfied with her first try; it's perfect and shoulder-length in front—a jagged and confused clutter behind, and when her mother finds out she screams at her so loud she'll have to apologize to the neighbours the next day. Brooke imagines how she might be dragged to a hair salon afterwards, her mother leaving tiny half-moons all over her forearm, and the cabbie's expression mirrors that of the sympathetic hairdresser she'll meet: cheeks sucked in, mouth curved downwards with composed effort because she thinks it's funny—meanwhile Mom flails around the salon with a rolled-up magazine, swatting suggestions of a pricey coif and lather like they are lecherous mosquitoes. When the cabbie doesn't look again, Brooke puts a conscious hand to the back of her head. She can't feel anything wrong. The rest of the drive, she squeezes her hands between her knees and picks at her nails.

As they near the town, the empty beaches fill up with people; umbrellas mushroom from the ground and sway drunkenly. The cab driver honks at a family that has crossed the road in a hurry to plant its own beachball-coloured flag in sandy real estate, but he can't stop the trickle of people seeping through and overflowing the brittle traffic dyke, chasing the diminishing water as if they are themselves being yanked by the pull of the tide. Kyklos is a tourist town, but Brooke is a tourist too (or aims to be—she's just passing through). The taxi stop-goes all the way to the town square where she politely asks to be let off. With her carry-on flung over her shoulder, she walks the rest of the distance to an address written on the back of her brain. Scraps of paper tend to misplace themselves even to the most careful of people, and Brooke never writes down anything sensitive on one of her body parts unless she's prepared to lose it. She's come across people who have made the mistake of doing so before—she's collected quite a few fingers and, on occasion, a couple of toes over the years. She's read about tongue tattoos, or bottom lip tattoos, or even eyelid tattoos and her mind wanders sometimes.

She passes by a beach-facing patio where a couple basks in the incandescent warmth emanating from everywhere: the fraying sunlight, the toasty taverna, each other. They sip from iced teas or whiskeys—Brooke can't tell from here—and the woman's bare feet rest low on a cracking plank-table, pink and sandy and creasing with starving tension as the man murmurs into her ear.

Brooke presses on and finds her way to a stuccoed cluster of low-rise apartments a little ways off the beach. Four vacationers on the farthest balcony fiddle with fat designer sunglasses and strap up criss-crossed sandals, their American laughs careening all the way down the road. Brooke has her key ready and slips unnoticed through a vine-twisted gate that guards the entrance to her apartment. A cramped, tiled staircase takes her up to the second floor. There are three bedroom doors and the hallway opens into the kitchen where a hanging lamp dangles too low over the dinette. Brooke eases each door open and peeks inside their respective rooms. The first and second are ordinary if sparsely decorated spaces with single beds, desks, and bookcases. She leaves her bag in the second.

The third Brooke finds empty except for a few thick vertical rolls of milky plastic sheeting that stand nearly as tall as her, untouched. A set of folding chairs and tables lean neatly against the exposed drywall—off to the side someone has thoughtfully left bleach, paint buckets, rollers, and starchy tubs of innocent Polyfilla. She knows what all this is for. Brooke's breathing sounds different here, as if it's being amplified but not allowed to escape the room, sucked into the morose drywall, sealed up, painted over. When it becomes too much for her, she quickly backs out and closes the door—she releases the knob the way she'd back away from a snarling dog on a taut chain. Once at a safe distance she turns her back on it and explores the kitchen, pulling open a cabinet and inspecting its surprisingly homey dishes, but she can still feel it over her shoulder—can still smell the chemical sweetness of industrial supplies as it begins to take over the apartment. It stinks, languorously oppressive like a dead relative nobody wants to deal with or move, shaming eyes baton-passing the responsibility from person to person until it makes a couple of revolutions and somebody can't stand it anymore. With quickness, Brooke rescues her carry-on from the second room and dumps it on the bed of the first, unpacking to keep her hands busy.

Making sure all corners are hers alone—closet empty, desk and dresser drawers the same, bed...—Brooke discovers a foreign but familiar rifle case tucked underneath her bed and brings it out into the better light of the kitchen to look at it more closely. It makes no pretensions about what it is, unlocked and inviting—it's hers. She's never seen this one before, but it belongs to her world.

Disassembled pieces of a sniper's rifle lie snug in felt burrows, these compartments shaped and segmented like the obscure box of a board game not yet set up, and Brooke determinedly takes to figuring it out. It's a puzzle she's practiced over and over again, poetry in its rhythm and repetition—she winds and screws (and screws and screws), she tugs and releases, and she knows she's done when it tells her. Her machine hands hum a pinched red from the finicky details that require all fingertips and nails, the strained exertion she's come to expect holding it the way she does and always has done. She allows for a glance outside into the sun and all the way down the road she sees a woman walking two stumbling children up from the beach, towels hugged around them like Dracula capes. She suddenly wonders if, at this range, she could pick off the littlest one from here—the one who lags behind and kicks sand from her flip-flops, violet face teary and her turbulent complaints felt through the almost-there magnification of this scope—and how might she correct and account for windage and drop, ensuring a clean, killing entry and exit. The girl would flop on the ground and onlookers would wildly search, puzzled, but Brooke would be long gone before they decided this was really happening, that they weren't just daydreaming in this lazy, tourist-town heat.

Then, as suddenly as the unexpected hornet thought came flitting in, Brooke empties her mind and looks at a rust spot on the balustrade outside her window. She waits until there is no one in her view anymore before she looks at the water again, palms cold. The thought didn't scare her. It was the nonchalance she felt thinking it, the brash confidence of knowing she'd get away. Because she is practiced. Her once-suggestible hands, now steel and tempered, were made this way. She doesn't know why she pauses in reflection now, only that she feels the need to. This scares her too.

She busies her hands again, tweaking what needs to be tweaked with a screwdriver and a file, until she is brought out of her throat-lump trance: she hears footsteps on blocky stone steps, the kind a powerful loafer makes, cutting through all else. They ascend and pause, and key-fisted talons claw and scrape at the door. When it opens, Brooke already has a 9-mm pistol that she found at the bottom of the rifle case within her grasp. Her hand hovers there, however, because she isn't being taken totally by surprise. A man appears at the end of the hallway, dark-skinned, neatly bearded, and neatly dressed in jeans and a clean, button-down shirt. His arms Boa-constrict a large paper sack—sprigs of bobbing greens stick out the top, and he moves with a disarming plastic rustle. When he peers through his thick frames and sees Brooke in the kitchen, the contours of her spine a delicate twist as her head turns in profile view to look him over, he stops in place and lets her do it without challenge. She's got one hand poised near but not quite on a pistol in plain view. For a moment, they are at a standstill. She can snap off a shot straight down the hallway so she is in no hurry to make the first move, but he knows she is still a little uncertain about the paper bag—if he's hiding a weapon of his own inside or behind it.

Probably to diffuse the situation, he goes first: "Which room is you?"

"First on your right," Brooke tells him.

The man has an accent—clipped middle-class Londoner, she figures it for. He asks, "You aren't expecting me?"

"I am." Rachel might have mentioned it in passing, a new partner. No one to Brooke but a replacement for the one she lost, though. She decided early on to keep an eye on him.

"Just jumpy, then?"

"What's in the bag?"

"Dinner, love." He places it on the tiled floor and gives it a strong nudge in her direction. When he moves into the second bedroom, Brooke stands and approaches the offering. She puts it on the counter and finds he isn't lying. She allows him past when he returns.

"Domenic," he says.

"Brooklyn," she says back.

#

Domenic has set the lamb to lightly sear, his snake-charmer hands producing a hidden hiss from behind a covered skillet. They work their way over to a saucepan, stirring with a metal spoon, while Brooke placemats the table with maps, photos, and clasped files. The materials are a copy of the things she looked over when Rachel visited. The photos are of the man, a rustic-looking house, an alleyway. The maps are marked with circles and scrawled X's.

"Addison Seager," Brooke reads out. Their mark. "Forty one and out of the intelligence game. Has been for sixteen years."

Domenic keeps stirring.

"Have you done this kind of thing before?"

Domenic keeps stirring.

"So why _you_?"

Domenic stops stirring.

Brooke doesn't intend for this to be a hostile question. There's a genuine searching behind her casual bluntness. She wants to know him in the way she knew Benson, but she doesn't know how to try—where to start. Benson was always different. Maybe because she knew he never belonged and she always wondered the same thing: why _him_?

Domenic thinks. "'Cause I was here, I suppose. It's all very convenient, isn't it?" He starts up again. "I've come recommended—if it makes you feel any better. I've done work for the doctor before. Nothing quite like this, but all sorts of... similar. However, she made it very clear: I'm your backup, not the other way around. Which suits me fine, honestly." Domenic leaves the saucepan alone and begins to work on a bundle of carrots. He snips off their knobby ends with a flick of his chef's knife, sweeping the unwanted bits from the chopping board and onto the countertop.

"Did you wonder about me?" Why _me_? Brooke holds Seager's photo in front of her face, but her stare grazes overtop, watching the airy movement of his hands. They are machine hands too, exerting the identical amount of pressure with each downward slice; effortless, practiced, merciless and without waver.

"Not one to ask questions, love. It's what makes me valuable."

Domenic is right about that. Brooke forces herself to get back into her old mode. Find that confident woman who would be perfectly fine with firing a rifle out of a window—the woman who fantasized about it. Seager's face comes into focus. She says, "How much trouble do you think he'll be?"

"Him? Nothing. Sixteen years' retirement makes you a bit useless. But the man's got angels looking out for him. They're who we've got to worry about, and it's up to us to find out who they are."

"Inside of a week?"

"That's generous, believe me." Domenic scoops up the peeled and sliced carrots and deposits them inside the saucepan. "Because most of the work's already done for us. Stand back and look at the table for a minute, love. That there is Mr. Seager's entire life. We've got it down to the minute, where he'll be, and who he'll be with on any given day."

Brooke can't help but lean back and do as Domenic suggests. Laid out this way, Seager's life is a chart of numbers and a network of footpaths. She feels large sitting at the table, her elbows propping her up over everything. In this moment she is all-powerful, all-seeing. The lines drawn on the maps tell her a story of what has been and what's about to be. It's been a while since she's felt this kind of control—since she felt _in_ control. She silently thanks Domenic for this tiny moment of pleasure he's provided her.

Domenic adds the seared lamb to the steaming saucepan with tongs and lets it stew. He retrieves two dripping bottles of beer from the fridge and passes one to Brooke. She takes it tentatively, but Domenic has already won her over. Wrapping a damp washcloth over the handle of the saucepan, he picks it up as Brooke starts to clear the mess from the table. But he moves around her and heads out onto the balcony where there is patio furniture waiting to be used. He calls Brooke over to take a look, to see what he sees, and she follows with her beer, meeting the whispered tickle of evening wind rolling off the cooling sea. The sun is drooping under the visible, jutting edge and she can see the intimate lights of the little town all down the coast. She realizes they don't upset her like they did in the big city where she was always trapped behind glass, looking out. Here she is closer. Here she is within. Domenic looks out at Kyklos too and they clink their bottles together.

When Brooke raises it to her lips, the welcome chill makes her think of the couple she saw earlier in the day with warm skin and iced teas or whiskeys—she couldn't tell—and how they were collapsed over and under each other. It makes her think of Benson, yes, but it makes her take a glance at Domenic too. And this makes her think that for the first time since waking up in this world that's not hers things will be all right.


End file.
